Breakfast at The Lodge

We believe you should start your day with a healthy, freshly prepared breakfast, from fresh fruit salads with organic yoghurts and freshly baked bread, to eggs benedict or roasted mushrooms with lemon crème fraiche. Or maybe something simple like croissants with home made preserves. The choice is yours, so enjoy your breakfast at leisure and have as little or as much as you want!

Part of our vision for Astelia Lodge is to grow much of our own food so that we can offer guests a fresh ‘taste' of New Zealand. What we do not produce ourselves, we endeavour to source locally. And if it's meat and eggs or dairy, we try to buy organic or at least free range. Like you probably do, we want to know where our animal products come from and what sort of lives they have.

Sample breakfast menu

Oat pancakes with seasonal fruits and real maple syrup

Continental breakfast, with cereals, fruit, croissant and home made preserves

Bacon & eggs, any way you like

Our choice of breakfast varies from time to time. If you have any allergies or particular requests please do mention them well in advance.

Vegetarian Food

At the Lodge, we believe food is food! And so vegetarian food is as much part of the menu as is meat and fish. It's not an 'option' or an 'alternative' choice. It's what we do, with as much care and attention to taste and presentation as anything else we might provide for you. A meat free dish is simply another dish that may appeal to you, and a lot of our guests frequently choose a vegetarian breakfast simply because it looks and tastes good! We've also recently added some choices for Vegans.

If you are a vegetarian or vegan, here are some things you like might like to know about the way we prepare food.

All vegetarian meals are prepared with separate boards, knives and implements, so you can be sure the same spatula used to fry bacon hasn't been used to turn your oatcakes!

For all our breakfast meals, we try to buy organic if we can, or at least free range. Seasonally, many of the vegetables and fruits are from our own garden, and while not certified as organic, they are grown with a minimum of fuss and chemical intervention.

Gluten free Orange & Almond cake

Recipe

Ingredients Specials

2large navel oranges, (choose oranges with unblemished skins as the whole fruitis used in this recipe)

5eggs

11/4 cups (250g) caster sugar

21/2 cups (250g) ground almonds

1teaspoon gluten-free baking powder*

Pureicing sugar to serve

Method Notes

Step 1

Preheat oven to 170°C. Grease and line the base of a heart-shaped pan. Step 2

Place the two whole oranges in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer, covered, for 1 hour, ensuring that the oranges remain covered with water. Drain and cool. Chop the oranges into quarters, discard any seeds, then place the chunks into a blender and puree until smooth. Step 3

Beat the eggs with the sugar until thick, then add the orange puree, ground almonds and baking powder and mix well. Step 4

Pour into prepared pan and bake for 1 hour. Leave the cake to firm up in the pan for 20 minutes then turn out, remove the baking paper and turn over to finish cooling right way up. This cake definitely mellows with a little time and can be prepared up to 48 hours in advance. Step 5

To serve, sift icing sugar on top and decorate with orange zest and almonds.

SourceFresh Living - April 2005 , Page 49

Recipeby Robyn Russell

Our policy on waste. It's a circle of life thing!

Very little is wasted at the Lodge.

Glass, plastics, and so on, are all recycled.

Very little food is thrown away. Vegetable peelings and any uneaten fruit is fed to the Donkey and Alpacas, or if not suitable it goes on the two stage compost facility and ends up back on the vegetable patch which provides much of our produce for the year.